Sally Jupp was a gorgeous young woman who used her body and cunning to climb the social ladder. Someone has decided to make her pay for her sins, and Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh is determined to find the culprit. The Murder Room draws the reader into a chilling, darkly humorous, awe-inspiring world as the three partners travel far from their Victorian dining room to hunt the ruthless killers of a millionaire's son, a serial killer who carves off faces, and a child killer enjoying fifty years of freedom and dark fantasy. The book is not always easy reading. Baroness James has a taste for the longer sentence. They are perfectly constructed, but the meaning is not always evident on a first reading. I found myself rereading some parts to be sure that I had the meaning correctly and this does not make for relaxing reading. This is carried over into the dialogue. Everyone speaks grammatically and even the n'er-do-wells sound as though they're auditioning to be BBC newsreaders. Police personnel always speak politely to each other and there's little, if anything in the way of banter. I came to "The Murder Room" fresh from reading one of Ian Rankin's Rebus novels with all its gritty realism and the contrast could not have been starker.

Difficult to put down for readers who solve crimes in real life or who act as armchair crime-solvers...a real-life mélange of the shows Criminal Minds, The Mentalist, CSI, Lie to Me, Cold Case Gerald Etienne, the brilliant and ruthless managing director of Peverell Press, has been murdered in the publishing house's offices. His death is bizarre and puzzling, but Dalgliesh feels it's only the beginning of a deeper mystery. Commander Adam Dalgliesh is already acquainted with the Dupayne Museum in Hampstead, and with its sinister murder room celebrating notorious crimes committed in the interwar years, when he is called to investigate the killing of one of the trustees. He soon discovers that the victim was seeking to close the museum against the wishes of both staff and fellow trustees. Everyone, it seems, has something to gain from the crime. The resurgence of golden age crimewas blogged about only in July, but, according to Orion, "the market is not as bouyant" as anticipated. For James - as her fictional museum offers us a clue - those years were anything but wasted: they were foundational. At a time when Britons in their late 50s have lived long lives without a war about national survival, it is extraordinary to note that James represents a generation that grew to adulthood in the shadow of two world wars.Although grumpy senior police officers tend to be two-a-penny in British crime thrillers, there is something special about Tom Thorne which always makes me eager to catch up on his latest adventures. Nightingale House is a school young ladies attend to learn nursing skills, but after a student plays patient in a demonstration, she's brutally murdered. Then, another student dies in mysterious circumstances. Adam Dalgliesh will have to figure out who's responsible before more students die. In other respects, the writer's vintage makes a less useful contribution. It's a general rule of fiction that authors are happiest creating characters closest to their own age. This is because all fiction is broadly autobiographical. Male novelists in their early 20s create wincingly convincing teenagers but - by their 60s - are sketching adolescents who are merely embarrassing sexual fantasies. As an octogenarian novelist, James is showing similar difficulties of characterisation. how fascinating William Fleisher, Frank Bender, and Richard Walter are, but how uneven the author was in covering our three main characters (need more cool Fleisher stories, yo) Another elegant tale of murder, mystery, human misery and the wonder of love. James explores the lowest of depravity . . . with the most elegant prose.” — USA Today

In ceea ce priveste actiunea, Adam se intalneste cu un prieten jurnalist care il duce sa viziteze muzeul Dupayne ce are o sala dedicata celor mai celebre crime din anii 1920-1930. Aceasta adaposteste articole din ziare, fotografii si obiecte autentice de la la fata locului. Aflam despre cazuri celebre precum: I can’t say much more because of spoilers, but Thorne will meet his nemesis, which will drag up the past for him and his colleagues and put a number of people’s lives in danger. For those who like graphic and frequent violence and a classic police procedural, this may not fit the bill. It's more quietly cerebral, though all the cleverer for it.I have read one of Mark Billingham’s Tom Thorne novels before – Cry Baby – but this one was even better. Mark is an experienced, clever writer who combines excitement, gory murder, dark humour, comradeship, serial killers and hilarious police banter and wraps them all up seamlessly with no loose ends. No mean feat. Commander Dalgliesh has just published a new book of his poems and he's decided to take a brief holiday in a remote area of the Norfolk coast, staying in the converted windmill left to him by his aunt. Unfortunately, there's a psychotic strangler on the loose, and the killer is getting closer to his little corner of the world with every murder. This excellent thriller is brilliantly plotted with the suspense ramping up rapidly towards the chilling climax. I for one was totally unprepared for the massive twist that Billingham throws at us. It was stunning and cleverly done. The prologue and epilogue neatly bookending the novel are also superb and guaranteed to generate a gleeful laugh from the reader as poetic justice is dealt. Highly recommended for all fans of the authors and those discovering him for the first time. 4.5★ cazul Marie-Marguerite Fahrny care si-a impuscat sotul adulterin si care a scapat cu ajutorul avocatului, ce a indreptat un pistol spre juriu la pledoaria finala.

I did wonder, though, if there would be a next novel. P D James is 82 now and this is her sixteenth novel. Not all of them have featured Adam Dalgliesh, but he has appeared in the majority. I found the early books in the series such as "Cover her Face" and "Shroud for a Nightingale" to be eminently readable. For me her best novel was perhaps "Devices and Desires", which was complex and intriguing. The plot in "The Murder Room" is far less involved and there were occasions when I felt that the narrative was being padded out - for instance when a painting of no significance to the plot is described in minute detail. The author has an obvious love of elegant buildings and the finer points of art, but I felt she was self-indulgent. There was a time when I would have compared the concise writing of Ruth Rendell in her Wexford novels to that of P D James, but not any longer. This is an excellent book about an amazing group of people and well-written to boot. I must confess that I snagged it off the shelf because it is a "detection"-themed book, but never looked closer than the title/subtitle; as a result it took me a while to figure out that it was not fiction! But, in my defense, I thought that the author was just doing a superb job of story-telling, which, of course, he was. how we needed to conclude things better with the Boy in the Box case/maybe not feature it in the book so much since it's STILL not solved. I understand this is nonfiction, we can't have our pretty bows sometimes, but c'mon, even Capote took some liberties with the ending of In Cold Blood (to be reviewed soon, I just finished it yesterday).This is my second book by this author although “The Murder Book” is part of a series I do believe you could read this as a standalone even with the references to what has gone before. However, there are some really obvious issues of factual accuracy and consistency. Leisha Hamilton becomes "tall" (in the chapter where Walter visits her at work to confront her) after Capuzzo has described her several times as "petite and charming." At another point, Capuzzo describes an ancient Greek tragedy focusing on events around the Trojan War as having been written or taking place "seven centuries ago"; the Trojan War took place circa 1250 BCE and the play in question was first performed around 458 BCE. Richard Walter is described as visiting "from Pennsylvania" when the narrative strand that focuses on him has not yet covered his move to that area, and the reader should still be assuming that he's coming from Michigan. And when he's introduced, Walter is described in a way that makes him sound like he's British, so it's jarring to learn a few chapters later that he's actually originally from Washington State. In every one of the Dalgleish series I have read, we hear all about Kate Miskin’s previous housing. All James's characters talk in perfectly grammatical English, in sentences that never admit ellipsis or repetition. Even an "um" seems to be bad manners, and a surly young thug alludes to being on "the jobseeker's allowance", rather than the derisive or impenetrable slang which an ear to the streets suggests would be the case. Clearly the reason for this is that James can't tolerate sloppy English but, while this makes her linking prose a reliable pleasure, the dialogue suffers. Speech ain't always nice. This means that what Tom goes through we go through with him, and The Murder Book is a particularly bumpy ride. What seems like an interesting, but relatively straightforward case soon leads to hidden depths and an ending that is likely to reverberate through future books.